With Luck

John Lanchester

During the latter half of the Second World War, Ludovic, the deranged and upwardly mobile murderer of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, becomes ‘an addict of that potent intoxicant, the English language’. He begins an obsessive study of books about words, and starts to write a volume of pensées (a piss-take of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave). ‘Not laboriously, luxuriously rather, Ludovic worked over his notebooks, curtailing, expanding, polishing; often consulting Fowler, not disdaining Roget; writing and rewriting in his small clerkly hand on the lined sheets of paper which the army supplied.’ The Fowler referred to here is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler, usually known as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, and now brought out in a third edition, completely rewritten by the lexicographer Robert Burchfield.

We can take Ludovic’s reliance on Fowler as the synecdoche for a whole tradition; over the last seventy years, Fowler has been the place of first and last resort for English grammatical disputes. Perhaps a chief reason for the success of Modern English Usage is that it is so much less boring than one might expect – as, indeed, was its author. Henry Fowler was born in 1858, educated at Rugby and Balliol, and worked as a teacher at Sedbergh for 17 years before losing his job in a row over his refusal to prepare boys for Confirmation. Fowler was now 41. He moved to London, where he scratched a living writing pieces, ‘and attempted’, in Ernest Gowers’s words, ‘to demonstrate what he had always maintained to be true – that a man ought to be able to live on £100 a year’. In 1903 he moved to Guernsey and began working with his brother Francis Fowler, to whom Modern English Usage is dedicated. They produced a translation of Lucian, the first Concise Oxford Dictionary and, in 1905, a hugely successful grammar book called The King’s English. When war broke out both brothers lied about their age and joined up, only to be frustrated in their desire to be sent to the trenches. Frank died in 1918; in 1925 Henry went to live in Somerset, where he worked for the Clarendon Press and wrote his new usage book; he died in 1933.

‘The mystery remains,’ Burchfield writes in his Preface to the new edition: ‘why has this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book, in a form only lightly revised once, in 1965, by Ernest Gowers, retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars for just on seventy years?’ The fact that he feels the need to ask is a bad sign. Fowler has remained popular because he is spiky, idiosyncratic, and not at all shy about giving firm views. Burchfield finds his humour schoolmasterly, which isn’t quite fair; it is true that there is a degree of whimsy about some of the section-heads in Modern English Usage (‘False Scent’ about sentences which change track halfway through, ‘Unequal Yokefellows’ for asymmetrical constructions), but Fowler is usually more brisk than that. In his entry on ‘recrudescence’, for instance, he quotes the word being used in a literary context about Lord Melbourne and in a cricketing context about a Mr Laver, and goes on:

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Letters

John Lanchester accepts Robert Burchfield’s claim in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage about the double pronunciation of the word the (LRB, 2 January); but it is surely as false as many of his other claims, which do so much damage to the rest of the book, as they previously did to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is true that the is pronounced thuh (neutral schwa) before words beginning with a consonant, but it is untrue that it is pronounced thee (long e) before words beginning with a vowel. On the contrary, it is only ever pronounced thee for emphasis – at least in Britain, whatever may be the case in New Zealand. It is normally pronounced as thi (short i) before most vowels, and as thuh frequently before e and occasionally before other vowels in stressed syllables as well.

Nicolas Walter
London N1

John Lanchester expresses the hope, at the end of his fine review of the new Fowler, that someone will produce ‘a clear, unequivocally prescriptive account of contemporary written English’. The thing has already been done, by Michael Dummett, in his brief, forceful, crystalline, comprehensive Grammar and Style for Examination Candidates and Others (1993).

Having been born and brought up in South London, I naturally regard North Londoners as a separate tribe, or possibly, species. Nicolas Walter of London N1 (Letters, 23 January) confirms me in this view. I have never pronounced the in any way other than thuh before consonants and occasionally before a long e, and thee before vowels for emphasis. I have been listening for Mr Walter’s ‘normal’ pronunciation, thi, but have not detected it so far. I have also tried, with great difficulty, to use it myself and have been getting some strange looks – even from North Londoners.

I’ve spent most of my life saying thee and thuh – never thi – like my almost-neighbour John Burchell (Letters, 20 February). However, during my National Service (some of which I spent making do with der, die and das), I found myself in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where I came to doubt the existence of the. Even the stand-in t, as in ‘On Ilkley Moor bar t’at’, became dubious when pronounced by folk in and around Pontefract and Doncaster. And in the exemplary ‘Dahn in t’cellar coil-oil wheer t’muck clahts on t’winders’, the has become little more than a glottal stop.

Gordon Wharton
Wallington, Surrey

In my (East Anglian) pronunciation the indefinite article is invariably pronounced uh before a consonant. I believe this accords with standard usage, except that the latter may allow ay for emphasis. In the US, particularly among orators, the pronunciation ay is much favoured. Now the habit is spreading to the more ponderous politicians in this country, and seems, incidentally, to be a fair index of conservatism. Thus, the Home Secretary is an egregious ay man. Perhaps it is significant that Mr Blair is moving in that direction.